With Reverse-Engineer-Everything, has Software become basically worthless?

Comments

• Nemo@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  don’t confuse “impossible to use for rent-seeking” with “worthless”

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• scallisto@retrofed.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It wouldn’t be worthless, if people only reversed engineered existing software then the quality would slowly degrade, like a JPG that’s been shared too many times. You still need competant developers to write new software!

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• bryndos@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  No, the tools might become cheaper. But if someone can put them to useful work, then the tool has worth in combination with the labour , skills and other factors of production.

  Lots of things with no market price are worthy, air is a classic example.

  Will anyone develop an improved tool if they can't sell it?' Yes, craftspeople have always butted up against limitations in tooling, and the true masters of their craft will learn, improve and develop their tools so as to improve output, quality, efficiency of their own work. That'll still happen, though it might change in scale, scope and speed.

  I think craftspeople would benefit from not outsourcing their mastery to adobe - but more generally they'd benefit from deeper ownership and understanding of their tools - and always more independence and choice on inputs.

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• Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’m in no way an expert on this but my understanding of ai reverse engineering is that it’s buggy and lazily made. If that holds true, then I don’t see any reason reverse engineering software would ever compare to classic piracy.

  Now I am excited about it because reverse engineering software would give us far better results in breaking DRM, spoofing live services, or bypassing anticheats that lock us out of games for not using the right OS. I would love to see fallout 76 or Destiny 2 Rebuild for private servers, offline, and lan play.

  I do think it poses a serious threat to the subscription model and I’m all for that. There’s a satisfaction in using the weapons of the enemy against them.

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• whaleross@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Worthless as in people that don’t know what they are doing are making software reverse engineer original software that required somebody human to create.

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